Before Boing Boing Gadgets and Offworld were reabsorbed by the mother entity, we used to put up pointless, bizarre flash game parodies now and again. I just chanced across the preliminary work for Gadget Gauntlet, one such project that we never completed. The idea would have been the classic game Gauntlet II, but instead of being a Wizard, Warrior, Valkyrie or Elf mindlessly emptying a dungeon of treasure, you would have been one of four types of shopper wandering a zombie-infested mall to loot consumer durables. I thought you may enjoy the concept art and theme tune.

Wizard, as an ironist, you alone receive some sense of subjective freedom. Your outré dress sense deprives your surroundings of a finite degree of cognitive reality. In this manner, the dungeon can never truly hold you.

I love it when people read between the lines of old video games, imagining a backstory and motivation for the likes of Pong or Asteroids. But those early titles are so abstract that a certain kind of humor seems intrinsic to the project. So it's delightful to see someone with the same fetish I have: extrapolating literary pretensions from later games that offer more to work with, but whose hardware nonetheless imposed a ruthless minimalism onto the design. Read the rest